The Valkyrie Project (34 page)

She gingerly
scraped the key along the ground, careful to keep it pressed firmly under her leg as it chafed against the friction of the rough, gritty floor. When that course of action took her as far as it could, Ana realized it was within reach of her foot if she stood, or assumed a hunched approximation of standing, as it were. Her arms protested with aches and threats of detachment, but she told her body it was lucky the cuffs weren't electrified.

On her feet once more, she looked down at the key. Just as she reached her foot out to paw at it, a shadow passed by the door, momentarily obscuring the light. Ana froze.

She was not surprised that no one had passed the door up to that point—the floor was secure and it was after business hours. She just hoped that the dark of the room had veiled her movements within.

A moment later, the room went dark again and stayed that way as someone stood in front of the
small window, entering an access code into the security panel outside.

The click of the lock echoed in the small room like a death knell. The flood of light from the hall blinded Ana even as she looked away.

"I thought I saw something moving around in here. And what do I find but a caged rat."

T
he awful caw of the Raven Natalya.

Ana managed to keep her wits about her to some degree as she pulled the key under her foot casually back toward her.

"I should just leave you here to rot, but I'm fairly certain that something much faster and more definite is waiting outside this room. I will be much more satisfied as well to watch you tremble before a firing squad after the Board recognizes you are as unfit and worthless as I told them."

Ana crashed to the floor, exhausted and defeated. Her dramatic move covered her grab at the key on
the floor and lowered Natalya's guard. The onyx stones of her eyes gleamed as she stood triumphantly over her new prisoner.

Ana faked a few silent sobs but was spared further overacting when an alarm outside sounded. Natalya rushed to the door to see what dared to spoil her moment of victory. With no obvious cause in sight, she turned back to her quarry. That short break was all Ana needed to go from prey to hunter. Adrenaline overpowered the dull ache in her arms, and she worked the lock with the ease of someone who ha
d gone through the motions until they could do it unconscious.

Ana was on Natalya, her arm around the nasty woman's neck, pressing the gun stolen from the Raven's own holster to her chalky white temple.

"I'll have to take a rain check on the execution," Ana whispered into her ear.

The
n she flung Natalya at the table, giving the dark, bony woman a solid smack to the gut, doubling her over and giving Ana plenty of time to get out and shut the door behind her. She held the handle until she heard the lock click shut. She hoped it sounded like the clang of a durosteel prison door inside the room.

Ana almost took off at a dead sprint, b
ut paused to waggle her fingers, saying goodbye to the wannabe arch-villain. Natalya screamed and pounded on the door. Ana smiled to herself. It had been a while since she'd felt like a badass.

Guillermo walked right across the screen in front of her. Ana didn't need to rewind and watch it again to regret not having gone to the video feed immediately after the incident. She’d jumped through hoops to get access to Continuum data that left her empty-handed while the biggest clue she had sat right there in the Valkyrie Project headquarters.

Her brother had waltzed in with his groups of commandos and slipped out with only a single casualty. Ana still wanted the head of whichever one of his thugs had taken Justin's life, but she understood the intention behind the rest of the actions of the group and knew it had been a careless mistake, probably by an inexperienced agent.

Were they agents? Or were they just soldiers of fortune? Or something in between?

The answer would lead her to him.

Of course, first she had to deal with the question of how she was going to get the answer.

The obvious solution was to break into the Agency's data stores
—again—but before going through that charade, Ana suspected she might be able to shake down Malcolm and get him to divulge some additional classified information. He had caved pretty easily last time, but she had faced him down with undeniable truths. This time she packed no deadly ammunition of that sort.

Nevertheless, Memo was sticking his neck out and Ana needed to grab him before he disappeared into whatever deep, dark hole he'd been hiding in for the past
fourteen years. She had been poking around and chasing worthless Agency intel long enough.

Ana shut down the terminal and the image
of her brother and his gang faded into darkness. She stood, determined to suck all the privileged information from Malcolm's brain. She would prefer not to leave a desiccated corpse in his place, but if he thought she'd been a hard-ass before, he would not be prepared for her newly reinforced gluteus muscles.

Of course
, giving him all kinds of death stares would have been much more effective had he been in his office. Or a briefing room. Or anywhere on the ninth floor. But Ana couldn't find him in any of the spots that might be considered usual, and, not wanting to lose her momentum—or her opportunity to find Memo—Ana turned to her next best shakedown victim: Aerin.

"Hey
, Aerin." Casual. Real smooth. "Have you seen Malcolm recently?"

He glanced up, seemed to realize he should not have, and quickly returned his eyes to the dissected
electronic instrument lying on the table with its wiry guts shoved this way and that so Aerin could probe deeper inside.

"No, can't say that I have."

Unusually terse for the normally bubbly little man. Interesting sentence structure as well, as though he might have seen him, but was not allowed to tell anyone. Aerin's way of disguising the truth so he didn't have to actually lie.

"Well," Ana said, "
maybe you can help. What do you know about the group that broke in here? Anything you noticed in the videos? Reports? Research they had you do?"

"No. Nothing. Sorry."

Aerin didn't look up as the words clipped from his mouth.

"Really? No one asked you to look into anything?"

"No, but I am looking into this." He gestured at the pile of dismantled components on the work bench, keeping his eyes focused on it. "And I'm really busy right now. I need to get this done. Sorry I can't help you out."

"I understand. Sorry about that
." Ana hoped she could soften him up because his obvious attempt to dismiss her was, well, obvious. "I know you like to dig in to stuff though. Weren't you at all curious as to how they got in past all the security?"

"Well, I've been trying to tell them for months that there are several glaring holes waiting to be exploited if people were smart enough to
get past the more basic mechanisms." The words spilled out in a rush, a pent-up rant stored in a vein Ana had tapped. His head began to rise along with his ire, but it dropped again as he remembered whatever it was that had muzzled him at the start.

Ana waited, but he just stood, sullen and silent.

"Dammit, Ana!" He looked up, his eyes straining with sadness and confusion. "You only come to me when you need something! I'm happy to help you, but I'm not just another resource to be exploited!"

Ana stepped back. She didn't know where the sudden tirade
had come from, and while she couldn't deny that what he said was mostly true, he’d never seemed to mind before.

"Aerin, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to
…" Ana trailed off as she searched for words. Finding none, she broke from his painful stare, her eyes taking refuge in his pile of parts. "Maybe I'll come back when you're not as busy."

The coward's way out.

Aerin looked down again as well and whispered, "Yeah, come back another time."

Ana turned away, her stomach churning, the gears of her mind spinning untold revolutions in trying to process what had happened. It was as though someone had told Aerin that she had killed his childhood pet.

She returned to her desk and slumped in her chair, hands playing absentmindedly at her terminal. She checked Jrue's schedule. He was out on assignment, but she could not view any of the details. He hadn't told her about any assignment. Then again, she realized she hadn't spoken with him since Justin's funeral. Only twenty-four hours past that event and she'd gone from the complete blank slate of information, to seeing her brother in person, to saving her own life for the hundredth time while biting her thumb at the Bitch Natalya, to feeling like someone had set fire to the bridges that connected her to her friends and possibly her sanity. Maybe she could hop in the Continuum's time machine to go back to see how everything had spun out of control so quickly.

Or she could push forward and find her confounding tease of a brother.

--

The Raven Natalya exited the building, her lips colored
a much brighter red than her usual dried blood shade. Her eyes were ringed in black, a heavy circle contrasting against the stark white around her jet black pupils.

Ana fell in behind her as soon as they'd cleared the Spire's secure perimeter. They passed a
high-priced salon, a high-class restaurant, and a high-rent high rise before a break in the buildings that served as an alley. Ana picked up her pace to pull alongside Natalya and forced her into the alley. She held her gun waist high and hissed at the Raven to get in the hovercar stashed there. Ana had gotten lucky on that count. Natalya's hot date could have been in the other direction, leaving Ana to question her in a much less confined space. Fifty-fifty chance and the odds broke in her favor.

"Get in the car!" she
snapped when Natalya hesitated. The Raven looked ready to shout, but could come up with nothing to make someone passing by on the street want to stop.

"You're crazy," Natalya spat
instead. "You have no idea what you're doing."

But she got in.

Ana kept the gun on her as she lifted off and zipped down the alley between two towering structures. "My Agency doesn't know anything about the group that invaded both of our offices. I don't think there will be such a lack of answers from the Continuum."

"I think you've got the wrong person."

"Just tell me what you know."

Fear
outlined Natalya's eyes like another layer on top of dark eyeliner.

"Tell me and I'll let you get back to your date. I'll drop you wherever you need to go if you tell me what I need to know."

"Ana, please. I'm not the person who's going to help you with this."

"Oh, you know my name now? Isn't that convenient?"

"Yes. I do. And I know they've been holding back a lot of information from you at your Agency."

"Really? You think?"

Natalya looked at Ana, sympathy drowning the fear in her eyes. She cast about for the words to make her kidnapper understand.

Understand what?

"This whole thing," Natalya started, "it's more complicated than your Agency can deal with. Your leaders have neither the foresight nor the comprehension to see more than black and white options."

"Maybe you don't understand," Ana broke in
. "I don't care what the Agency does or what its leaders can or cannot comprehend. I want to know about the group that is stealing information from both of us. There's a link between the groups, but—" Ana interrupted herself. "No! I don't even care about that. I just want to find them!"

Ana sped through cross traffic and swerved perilously close to sides of
new buildings that sprang up forming the crevice of the alley on the other side of the thoroughfare. Natalya grabbed the roll bar at her side, more out of panic than the thought that it might somehow protect her.

"I know they killed your friend, so if this is some vendetta
—"

"It's not a vendetta. You can call it atonement if you want, I don't care. I just need to find them."

"Ana, the fight we are fighting, it is bigger than you and me. It is bigger than some group of misfits who assume they're doing the right thing because they're fighting against organization in favor of their careless notion of chaos."

"I've been fighting this grand fight you're talking about for way too long.
I don't care how big it is. I don't care about the big picture anymore. I just want to find them."

Natalya sighed, accepting that she would not convince Ana.

"When you came to the Continuum, I thought you knew what you were fighting for. My superiors, unlike yours, know the endgame is bigger than a pissing match between intelligence organizations. I thought you would see that. Now you are like a lost little puppy who just wants to find her owner. I'm sorry. You could have been much more, but they've dealt you a poor hand and bid you in to a game you cannot hope to win. Since there is no trump I can play, I will tell you what I know. The group that broke into our facility, they stole the package that you and Etienne brought back from Triton Laboratories."

"The A
ndrokal."

"Yes."

"That's it? You have no information on the people who did it? The Continuum has no information on them?"

Again, pity and a condescending condolence appeared on Natalya's angular face.

"You really don't know? The leader of the Rebels—we don't have a better name for them—I mean," she paused, looked down, then at Ana again, "you don't know?"

Ana dropped the hovercar
to the ground, the alley just as dark as it had been where she'd forced Natalya inside. It was almost as if the weight of the moment dragged the car down to the poorly paved piece of earth. She turned to face the Raven, and her face showed the same gravity.

"I know," Ana whispered, "but I want to hear you say it."

"The leader of the Rebels is Guillermo Callif. He was your brother until the Continuum kidnapped him at age eleven."

Ana did not look away, but when she blinked, tears ran hot down her cheeks.

"Why?" She whispered the question, then her throat convulsed and it repeated as a deafening roar in the tiny space of the hovercar. "Why!"

"The Continuum
selected him to be their leader. I had as much say in the matter as I did with recruiting you."

Ana shoved aside th
e fact that Natalya was trying to cover her ass. She wasn't pointing the gun at her passenger anymore. Nothing to fear but the rage of a woman who was waiting in line to cross the border into Out of Control.

"He's not leading you
though. So, that kind of backfired, didn't it?"

"Gu
illermo found some documents before he was prepared to see them. They should have been hidden better, but our former leaders underestimated his intelligence and cleverness. Your brother misinterpreted the information and it changed his beliefs regarding the Continuum, radically. I'm sure it was something like what you are going through right now. He turned his back and left and disappeared. But after a while he came back and started fighting against us."

Before Ana could excoriate her with the kind of retort she loved to
toss as Natalya, the Raven continued.

"Ana, I know I've been harsh. I made assumptions about what you knew and acted on those assumptions.
In that way, I made the same mistake Guillermo did. I realize now, through your admirable show of honesty here, that I was wrong. But the Agency was wrong for thrusting you into a situation without the background that you needed to be successful. I hope you too won't make the same mistake your brother did and turn away from the Continuum."

"Get out."

"Ana, please—"

Ana
brought the gun back up and leveled it at the Bitch Natalya.

"Get out!"

Natalya reached back to the door panel, her eyes locked on Ana's, opened the door, and slid out.

"Ana, I can promise
—"

"Shut the door!"

As soon as it was done, Ana took off, climbing into the swirling Friday night traffic—people going to theaters, restaurants, bars, hotels, and one woman who remembered the last time she had felt so emotionally beaten down was when she failed to find a three-year-old who looked just like the pictures of her brother at that age. Some of her most vivid memories of him were from that time when she was eight and he was three. She almost had him again; she sensed that he wanted to return to her. But he stood on the other side of a chasm that spanned half a lifetime. Even if she called out, would the sound carry across that vast distance? He had to know she wanted to see him again: to create a robot out of parts stolen from around the house; to tell him what her life had been like and have him listen like she was gossiping about high school; to listen to him relate the events of his life since that day when the Continuum stole him from her.